Data Hub: A Modern Vision for Storage

Evergreen

The Evergreen™ Storage experience is like SaaS and the cloud, but on-premises as it continuously delivers Pure innovations in software and hardware to you – without any disruption, downtime, or data migrations.

Data Analytics

Evergreen

The Evergreen™ Storage experience is like SaaS and the cloud, but on-premises as it continuously delivers Pure innovations in software and hardware to you – without any disruption, downtime, or data migrations.

Pure Storage Advances Its P3 Channel Partner Program Forms International Partner Advisory Council

All-Flash Storage Array Pioneer Wins Channel Support from Legacy Disk Solution Providers in Droves; Attracts Over 100 New Partners to Drive Massive QoQ Growth in Its First Full Year of Channel Operations

Mountain View, CA – July 18, 2013 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise array company, reaffirmed its commitment to the channel today, announcing the formation of a new international partner advisory board, the Pure Storage Partner Advisory Council (PAC), and unveiled sweeping advancements to its Pure Storage Partner Program (P3), including new partner tiers, expanded benefits, training tools and support features. The newly updated P3 program was designed to accelerate partner profitability and demand generation, offering pre-sales tools and rewards that align to performance goals, sales and technical capabilities and marketing investments. In its first full year of channel operations, the company signed more than 100 partners worldwide and achieved over 125-percent consecutive quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) channel growth.

“Storage systems and services are among the bestsellers in the channel today, and solution providers are being called upon by their enterprise and midmarket customers to provide equipment, software and support to ensure data availability and integrity,” said Lawrence M. Walsh, president and CEO of The 2112 Group, a channel research and strategy firm. “Flash continues to become an increasingly viable alternative to legacy enterprise storage solutions, making it a prime opportunity for the channel.”

P3: Accelerating Mainstream Adoption of All-Flash Storage Worldwide

Pure Storage first announced its plan to be 100% channel devoted when it launched in August 2011. To underscore its commitment to the channel, the company then launched P3 in July 2012. Since that time, it has successfully secured more than 100 partnerships with forward-looking organizations that recognize the numerous benefits and immense opportunity presented by the company’s award-winning FlashArray. The company has aggressively expanded its international footprint as well, securing strategic partnerships with resellers across the EMEA and APAC regions, including Softcat in the United Kingdom, Antemeta in France, Observatory Crest in Australia, EmFrontier in Korea, and Tokyo Electron Device Limited (TED) in Japan.

“Flash storage is gaining acceptance as a mainstream medium now—and not just for performance gain. The channel needs to be prepared for this and should look to identify those storage vendors who can demonstrate a definite capability to support such workloads in a highly performant manner, at a cost-effective price point,” said Clive Longbottom, founder and service director at Quocirca. “The vendor should be a trusted partner in the relationship, providing all the additional support the channel company needs.”

The Pure Storage PAC: Uniting the World’s Leading Channel Executives

Bringing together executives from many of the storage industry’s most prominent value added resellers (VARs) and strategic partner organizations worldwide, the Pure Storage PAC will help to shape the trajectory of the company’s channel and go-to-market strategies, advise on partner sales and technical initiatives, and participate in future product roadmap discussions.

The new Partner Advisory Council is an invitation-only coalition with representatives in many of the world’s leading resellers in the IT and enterprise data storage markets that will help to drive Pure Storage’s partner strategies and enable the company to continue developing its best-in-class channel program. Inaugural members of the PAC include:

Not All Channel Partner Programs Were Created Equal: The P3 Difference

The P3 program recognizes partners who lead with Pure Storage and provides a roadmap towards achieving the highest margins in the industry, recurring revenue streams and partner led services opportunities. Pure Storage offers channel partners unparalleled demand generation and sales tools, demo gear and rewards for selling its award-winning FlashArray in three newly created tiers: Gold, Silver and Authorized, and was designed to offer a fast track to capitalize on the high-growth enterprise flash storage market. Enhancements to P3 for 2013 include:

New P3 Gold and Silver Partner Tiers: Developed to support partners at different stages of maturity. Partners earn greater benefits and rewards as they achieve sales and technical accreditations, participate in demand generation marketing programs and deliver pre and post sales customer value-add services (POCs and Installation Services).

New PureRewards: a rewards based program for delivering pre and post sales value-add services

Deeper deal registration discounts based on higher value add tiers

Competitive take-out program margin guarantees

MDF and incentives based on specified demand generation activities

Demo lab gear seed units for the new “Million Dollar Club”

New PureAcademy: an online learning management system to on-board partners

Sales and technical training videos delivered by sales experts

Same training used internally for Pure Storage sales teams

iMobile access & downloadable sales acceleration resources

New PureDemand: A suite of fully funded online and off-line demand generation tools

Automated content syndication

Co-brandable templates and campaigns

E-mail and Call Blitz Appointment programs

“We are exceedingly proud of P3’s traction and successes over the past year. The response from industry leading VARs and distributor organizations has been extremely gratifying and validates that our decision to be 100% committed to the channel in our go-to-market strategy was the right one,” said David Hatfield, President at Pure Storage. “We will continue to invest in the execution of our channel-led sales efforts, as we strive to be best in class across all enterprise storage companies. We will we work closely with our newly formed partner advisory council to deliver next generation solutions that address customer pains like never before, and develop innovative sales and technical support tools that will support a thriving partner ecosystem.”

Partner Quotes

Corus360
“Corus360 views Pure Storage as one of the leaders in the flash-based array market, primarily because of their enterprise-class software, which most other manufactures are lacking today,” said Steve Johnson, president and CEO at Corus360. “We also believe that the architecture and hardware components Pure Storage has standardized on are prime to support enterprise-ready scalability, which has helped our customers to see them as a viable option on which to run Tier1 applications. FlashArray helps to solve their pain points without necessitating a costly investment in a large hardware footprint that traditional storage arrays would require to meet the same strong performance demands.”

Dewpoint
“Dewpoint is going to market with flash storage in a big way—we firmly believe that the future of storage is based on innovative software design using flash technology. It is apparent that spinning disk is the current limitation for customers to receive high performance results from their database and virtualization infrastructures,” said Brian Dumont, VP of sales at Dewpoint. “With its inline deduplication, Pure Storage’s all-flash array provides our customers with a cost effective method of achieving high performance results for VDI and database workloads. It is clear to Dewpoint that Pure Storage’s investment in its software is paying big dividends in its price-performance strategy.”

NCE Computer Group (Europe) Ltd
“Pure Storage really differentiates itself from other all-flash storage array vendors with its sophisticated enterprise-class software. FlashArray offers unrivalled resiliency that’s been proven in hundreds of deployments, while providing a range of data management features supporting third party applications such as VMware vSphere,” said John Greenwood, Director – Solution Sales, NCE Computer Group (Europe) Ltd. “Pure Storage’s commitment to its channel partners is evident through its extensive partner programme, P3, which not only provides my team with the support and training they need, but also offers NCE significant rewards and benefits in the form of discounts and margins. Pure Storage provides us with all the tools we require to address our clients’ business challenges, and offers them an all-flash storage array at a price point they can afford, to suit all workloads.”

Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data center. When compared to traditional disk-centric arrays, Pure Storage all-flash enterprise arrays are 10x faster and 10x more space and power efficient at a price point that is less than performance disk per gigabyte stored. The Pure Storage FlashArray is ideal for high performance workloads, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.

The Pure Storage and “P” logo marks, Purity Operating Environment, and RAID-3D are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.